Pulp Fiction
Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade’s Fables in Slang or Chester Himes’s Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has gone stale.
I’ve always liked the energy of Luc Sante’s sentences, and in the above post about unpacking his library, the man reveals what gets him going.
Oh, almost at random, here is Sante on “the eroticism of automobile accidents”: “Could you conceive of anything more sicko-weird? But cars are sexual objects, obviously, and if their essence is speed, consummation can be achieved only through impact. Every car commercial on television is an invitation to a Liebestod.”
(A nod here to my colleague Hua Hsu who, around midnight early this winter, standing in the photocopying room in our department, offered a paen to Sante. And to David Haglund, through whose post earlier this month, I learned about Sante’s blog.)
